The Shift from Impressive to Transformative AI
Most business leaders I meet no longer need to be convinced that AI works. They’ve seen the pilots, the demos and the copilots. The question I hear in boardrooms now is different: How do we move from AI that impresses to AI that changes how the business actually runs?
That is the question Microsoft Frontier Company was built to answer, and to date, we have engaged on nearly 500 projects with over 200 customers across 28 countries.
Customers including 3M, Alaska Airlines, BMW, Core42, KT, Land O’Lakes, London Stock Exchange Group, Mastercard, McKesson, Northern Trust, Novo Nordisk, Publicis Groupe, Saint-Gobain, Siemens and Unilever are seeing real value from working side by side with our Forward Deployed Engineering teams.
More importantly, most customers where we have completed initial projects have returned for additional engagements, generating hundreds of follow-on projects. Customers don’t come back for engineers. They come back because the first engagement delivered something they could measure and they can see the next workflow worth redesigning.
Overcoming the Barriers to AI Adoption
The technology is ready. What slows AI down is everything around it. That means identifying where AI can deliver the greatest value, building in trust and governance, redesigning the operating models and helping people work in new ways. Technology and people have to move forward together.
Practical Examples of AI in Action
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Unilever: Collaborating with Microsoft engineers to bring AI into its factories. On the factory floor, intelligent technology helps teams boost efficiency and deliver superior products to customers. In Pondicherry factory — Unilever’s largest Home Care Liquids factory in South Asia and a 2026 World Economic Forum Lighthouse site — a digital twin built on NVIDIA Omniverse and hosted on Azure simulates a real factory environment with integrated live data.
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3M: Working with our engineers to help its Global Business Services team automate customer order management. The companies are building an AI agent-driven workflow to assist with credit checks, delinquency assessments and system updates, with human-in-the-loop controls and a custom monitoring dashboard for real-time visibility and approvals.
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Publicis Groupe: Co-building with our engineers to bring AI into the heart of how it works and delivers for clients. Microsoft engineers work side by side with Publicis teams to design and build agentic processes grounded in Microsoft IQ, so agents work with the business context, data and knowledge behind Publicis’ work.
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Northern Trust: Needed to accelerate onboarding to its Asset Servicing Front Office Solutions platform, a process that took about two and a half weeks per client. Our engineers worked alongside Northern Trust’s experts to build an AI-powered onboarding agent within the Excel and SharePoint tools analysts already use.
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KT: One of South Korea’s largest telecommunications providers, wanted to help network operators identify and respond to problems faster. Our engineers worked from KT’s offices to co-build AIO-Net, a continuously learning AI agent.